our creativity, our ability to cooperate to solve problems and complete
complicated tasks. As soon as humans started using signs and symbols to
represent the natural world, they pushed beyond the limits of that world.
“In many ways human language is like the genetic code,” the British
paleontologist Michael Benton has written. “Information is stored and
transmitted, with modifications, down the generations. Communication
holds societies together and allows humans to escape evolution.” Were
people simply heedless or selfish or violent, there wouldn’t be an Institute
for Conservation Research, and there wouldn’t be a need for one. If you
want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you
can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the
Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a
book on your lap.
IN the center of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of
Biodiversity, there’s an exhibit embedded in the floor. The exhibit is
arranged around a central plaque that notes there have been five major
extinction events since complex animals evolved, over five hundred
million years ago. According to the plaque, “Global climate change and
other causes, probably including collisions between earth and
extraterrestrial objects,” were responsible for these events. It goes on to
observe: “Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time
caused solely by humanity’s transformation of the ecological landscape.”
Radiating out from the plaque are sheets of heavy-duty Plexiglas, and
beneath the sheets the fossilized remains of a handful of exemplary
casualties. The Plexiglas has been scuffed by the shoes of the tens of
thousands of museum visitors who have walked across it, probably for the
most part oblivious of what’s beneath their feet. But crouch down and
look closely and you can see that each of the fossils is labeled with the
name of the species as well as the extinction event that brought its lineage
to an end. The fossils are arranged in chronological order, so that the
oldest—graptolites from the Ordovician—are close to the center, while the